Category: Personal

One of those weeks

I have been feeling as though I’ve been slacking off in posting here lately. Right at the end of last month and the beginning of this, I felt I was just getting back into a decent rhythm. That should have been a clear warning sign.

It started with what seemed like a simple request to add some memory to my laptop machine. I’m working on a fairly complex cost modeling project at the moment and the smart guy doing all the hard work decided it was time for me to have a more detailed look at his work. This is his way of making me feel as if I were adding some value to the effort, but I’m not fooled. It turns out that the memory on my old laptop was maxed out. My simple request for a memory upgrade turns into an upgrade to a new machine. Our IT guys were great, but they also know that I tweak my machines to a fair-thee-well. They did the basic upgrade, but then I ended up spending the next several days rebuilding and reorganizing my working environment. Very educational and a much needed opportunity to clean up a lot of accumulated cruft, but several days where blogging was impossible and when I did get my blogging tools restored, there were 1500 unread posts waiting for me in my aggregator.

By now it’s the weekend. Now I could start blogging or I could take these two fellows to watch the Cubs beat the Red Sox 7–6 on Saturday. It wasn’t a difficult choice:

DandZakatWrigleyCubsRedSox2005

The one with the new Mohawk is mine. The Monday after the Cubs game, I put him on the plane to skateboarding camp.

So finally, it’s off to my client and our financial model. I figure I’ll get to some blogging done in the hotel room after work. Instead I spend 5 hours in the emergency room at Mt. Auburn hospital learning about the joys of kidney stones (I had great sympathy for Dave Pollard’s experience a while back, now I empathize). The combination of drugs they put me on pretty much knocked me out for the next several days. I think we are finally back to some semblance of normal.

On Experience

This made me grin at least.

At the same time, if you get better and faster at recognizing your mistakes, that alone can help improve performance. I remember talking to my instructor a few years back as I switched from skiing to snowboarding. Her observation about both sports was that you could think of them as a series of controlled recoveries.

It’s only within the mythology of Soviet style planning (whether encountered during the Cold War or in a corporate environment ), that mistakes can’t be tolerated. If you’re quick and agile enough, you can recover from those small mistakes that you make every day. Step one in recovering from mistakes is recognizing them as quickly as possible (Step 0 is given yourself permission to make the mistakes you’re going to make regardless).

On Experience. On Experience —

“Experience is that marvelous thing that enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again.”
— Franklin P. Jones

(via The Quotations Page) [Frank Patrick’s Focused Performance Blog]

Generic meeting summary.

I’ve had reason to appreciate this sentiment far too many times in faculty meetings, partner meetings, and other settings where ego and brains fight for dominance. Worth remembering. Thank you Espen.

Generic meeting summary.

I think this goes for most meetings:

“[…] a […] faculty meeting is not over when everything has been said, it is only over when everything has been said by everyone. By my count, we’re about 2/3 done with the first criteria but only about 1/4 done with the latter.”

Not that I am not guilty of spurious (and oh so well formed) rambling overspecifications myself.

From ProfessorBainbridge.com via Infectious Greed.

[Applied Abstractions]

Happy blogversary to Jack Vinson

Congratulations to Jack on his 2nd blogversary. I can remember encouraging him to star his blog based on the cogent emails and comments I would get from him in response to my postings. We all won by getting him to share his insights.

Tonight, I’ll be a guest lecturer in Jack’s classs. I’ll be talking about the notion of personal knowledge management and why you might want to think about it explicitly.

2nd blogversary for Knowledge Jolt with Jack

I started this blog two years ago with the first of my (currently) 122 entries in the “events” category about David Weinberger speaking for AKMA at Seabury-Western. Funny that it turned out we’d have a baby on the 18th of May in 2004. And this year, I am teaching a class on knowledge management at Northwestern on this anniversary and birthday.

Happy day!

Comments

– jackvinson (jackvinson@jackvinson.com) [Knowledge Jolt with Jack]

My dinner with Buzz – time to get back to practicing blogging

I caught up with Buzz last week face-to-face. We were both in Cambridge, MA and managed to find time for some pizza at Bertucci’s followed by ice cream at Herrells. If you live in Cambridge, you likely know of Herrells. Those of you who don’t, should make the pilgrimage if quality ice cream is important to you.

Buzz chided me on my less than prolific blogging recently. The usual excuses apply; travel, new client projects, family sporting events when I am in town, etc., etc. But he’s right. I haven’t been making as much time for this practice as I should. Some of the issue is managing and rethinking the split between public and private blogging. I originally began using these tools as a backup brain and as an amplifier on my ability to stay informed about topics that matter to me. I still spend substantial time tracking topics using RSS and my aggregator, but much of that doesn’t find its way into McGee’s Musings nor should it.

I also use my local blog as the place where I draft and work out various ideas for my client projects and other efforts. Again, that is material that is frequently not ready for wide dissemination.

While I find these tools immensely important to my long term productivity as a knowledge worker, I still find it a difficult concept to sell. I don’t think we really give tools the importance they deserve if we are knowledge workers. If you’re reading this, most likely you’ve made this conceptual leap already. But how often do we encounter conversations like the one Rex Hammock reported last week on a question by Ellis Booker, “ What were you trying to achieve with your blog in the first place?”

I agree with Rex. I didn’t start this with a well-developed business case or a clear plan. The out-of-pocket costs to play with these new technologies are close to zero. The time costs can be a different question, but the potential payoffs are what is absolutely critical. And none of it fits into a business case any better than trying to calculate the future value of a newborn baby. You’ve got to live it to create whatever value is going to be found.

Here’s my analogy. We’re about where Frederick Taylor was when he started trying to figure out how to make manual, repetitive work more productive. Figuring that out was science at its most fundamental; observe, experiment, learn, repeat. The sooner you start, the faster you learn. If you continue the process, the most that anyone following you can do is to catch up to where you are now. Waiting for the answer is a sucker’s bet. It’s the person doing the practicing that gets better, not the spectator in the stands. So, Buzz, you’re right.

Dave turns 50

Dave’s turning 50 tomorrow. Since I celebrated 52 yesterday, let me offer my best wishes and let you know that it keeps getting better.

I started this blog courtesy of his software innovations and his example. I been using his innovations from nearly the beginnings of the PC revolution. ThinkTank helped me through many a consulting engagement and I remain a huge fan of good outlining software.

So, Dave, kick back for the day. Celebrate your successes. Illegitimi Non Carborundum. Then get back to innovating so the rest of us can make some progress attacking the problems of our choice.

If you want to wish me a happy birthday, first, let me say, thank you, mazel tov, a blessing back at ya, namaste and let’s have fun. I have one request, which I get to make because it’ll be my birthday tomorrow, and I’m getting in practice for one day of pure selfishness. Instead of sending an email, if you have a blog, how about posting your wishes on your blog with a link to mine? I could always use some more flow, and I’d love to climb a few notches on the Technorati list, truth be told. “;->”

[Scripting News]

Red Couch interview with Buzz Bruggeman

Shel does a fun interview with Buzz over at the Red Couch. As I read through it, it occurs to me that there is one more reason to become an ActiveWords user
buried in that interview. Sure, ActiveWords helps me be more productive
at my keyboard. But better yet, if you download ActiveWords and start
using it, chances are you will hear from Buzz shortly after. If you
blog about the experience, it's a virtual certainty.

Now, having a connection with Buzz is almost certain to lead to your
getting to know and meet lots of new and interesting people. But put a
little time and effort in from your side and you will get know Buzz
himself. And that's going to make your life more interesting. Pretty
good return on your investment, whatever currency you use to do your
calculations in.

Interview: Buzz Bruggeman.
Every industry has them and you probably know a few in your sector.
They are professional connectors, people who know everyone in their
industry and seem to have their hand on the pulse of what’s
happening. They help people find… [The Red Couch]

Light blogging ahead – from snow to sand in 24 hours

One fringe benefit of living in Chicago is that one morning you can discover the following view outside your front door:

and 24 hours later be looking at the
following:

We are now enjoying a bit of Spring Break in Kauai including my first ever opportunity to share a golf course with free
range chickens:

Given my general level of golf skills, this was an appropriate venue.

We
also have a high speed internet connection in the condo we are staying
in, although I expect blogging will take a back seat to sun
and sand.